Faces
by Evan Harrison
The mouth can move
within the space of a fist
and the brow goes up and down
like branches in soft breeze.
The whites are white or red.
This is all we have
to convince with.
Gauguin’s yellow Christ—
mouth a small stone from
the faraway fence, eyes
quietly closed—
could be plainly sleeping
or painfully dead, slack-faced
and free of blood.
That face, like the faces I remember,
speaks many things at once,
thus illegible, thus nothing.
Beneath the yellow hills
worms push soil.
You look at me, concerned
or cornered,
face becoming whole in the sun,
and I look and look
for a subdermal trembling.
[Hear Evan read “Faces”]
